This book examines the ways that oil economics will impact the rapidly changing global economy, and the oil industry itself, over the coming decades. The predictions of peak oil were both right and wrong. Oil production has been constrained in relation to demand for the past decade, with a...

The end of (oil) days -- Déjà vu -- Going wrong with confidence -- Abundance and its enemies -- The Hubbert curve ball -- Get thee to a statistics class -- From small acorns -- The strange controversy over Saudi oil production -- Track record -- She blinded me with science -- This is science...

Do political institutions limit rent-seeking by politicians? To address this question, we study the transformation of petroleum rents into hidden wealth using unique data on bank deposits in tax havens. We find that petroleum rents are associated with increases in hidden wealth, but only when...

This paper assesses the implications of the use of oil revenue for public investment on growth and fiscal sustainability in Cameroon. We develop a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model to analyze the effects of such investment on growth and on the path of key fiscal indicators, such as...

The impact of natural resources on intrastate violence has been increasingly analyzed in the peace and conflict literature. Surprisingly, little quantitative evidence has been gathered on the effects of the resource-ownership structure on internal violence. This paper uses a novel dataset on oil...

The purpose of this chapter is thus to review the concept of peak oil, critique its main propositions and assess the arguments advanced by oil optimists against those of peak oil. The paper begins with a presentation of the Hubbert peak theory and of some recent applications of the theory at the...